Closer to the chart - The UK Singles Chart Top 20 18th May 2014

IT’S ABOUT THAT TIME! Where my faith in humanity is slowly
eroded a few more precious notches, like a crumbling Devonshire cliff edge, my
inevitable hate-filled rampage a shaky cottage teetering perilously on the
precipice. Another few weeks of this shit and I’m going to start making
ornaments out of inattentive people’s skin. Looking over the chart the last few
weeks has taken five minutes because there’s been two (shit) songs each week,
but this week there’s been a bit of a shake-up and there seem to be dozens of
new songs. I’m not sure if this fills me with renewed vitality or grinds me
down further.

#20 Ed Sheeran –
One

You kinda felt bad insulting James Blunt because he served
his country with distinction and seemed (on Never Mind the Buzzcocks and the
like) to be a genuinely nice person. Ed Sheeran has no such luck, because
despite his resemblance to everyone’s favourite shepherd-machine-gunning
heir-apparent, Ed Sheeran has done nothing except release execrable ponderous
music people mistake for meaningful and deep. Only the slowly extending YouTube
progress bar informs me I’m listening to a top-twenty song and not my cunt
neighbour strumming disinterestedly away on his guitar wondering if this
tortured indie artist schtick will ever get him laid. The artificially-inflated
inexplicably-loved embodiment of everything that is wrong with British music,
and the British people as a whole, as ground down as they are by awful culture
that grows on any vestige of talent like gummy cheese and at this point so
utterly zombified that they’ll accept pretty much any clean cut white boy
making bum-gazing warbling noises with a guitar, or anybody inoffensively black
enough to let them pretend they’re listening to urban music. Fuck ‘em.

#19 5 Seconds of
Summer – Good Girls

The loathsome 5 Seconds of Summer are back in the chart,
still with a name that stands brazenly waving its pre-pubescent willy at the AP
Style guide. With anther terrible record with the veil of misogyny pulled so
thin it becomes transparent, this time though it doesn’t have a video, because
nobody could be arsed. I can almost see the meetings, the three five year old foetuses
pushed in an obnoxiously wide pram into the meeting room by their manager- who
is thoroughly coked-up enough to be able to look himself in the face every
morning without letting the overwhelming suicidal despair of managing a band
that play like a shite backcountry school band-night rendition of McFly ten
years after this style was even remotely unironically bearable get to him-
asking video producers to make them a video in their gurgling infant voices and
then being perplexed by the waves of video-producer suicide that follow them
across the world. Plus anyone who sings the line “Good girls are bad girls that
haven’t been caught” ought to take a gander at Maria Mandl’s Wikipedia article.
The fact that interesting, exciting musical artists scrape by from their music
while these jumped-up shitcunts strut around like an evil parallel universe
Wand Erection will be looked on by future generations as a crime.

#18 Jason DeRulo –
Wiggle

Wiggle is quite a funny word.

In Douglas Adams’ fabulous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
he describes one critic having their large intestine detach and leap up through
their neck to throttle their brain. That is what I genuinely began experiencing
in the moments I listened to this song, in between long breaks of heavy
drinking and screaming. If I were to say anything positive about this song, as
much as my fingers appear to be trying to rebel as I type this, I would say
Snoop Dogg knows what he’s doing, more than silky voiced DeRulo who must be
mainlining butter to have enough calories to try this hard to get a hit. He’s working so damn hard, really pushing
himself to try and get a viral hit, and knowing how utterly insipid chart
people are, he probably will. Damn you all to hell.

#17 Conchita Würst
– Rise Like a Penis

Conchita inspires a lot of conflicted feelings in me, and I
don’t just mean the usual mix of arousal and revulsion. It would be a crime for
me to insult someone with such a spectacular beard, or someone, paradoxically,
with such massive nuts as Conchita. I like that her inclusion and ultimate success
pissed off bigots across Europe to such an extent that Russia wants to create
its own fascist Euro song contest with none of that questionable sexuality and
spectacular camp that has totally never been in Eurovision until Conchita
turned up. That I like, because bigots are slightly below pinworms wriggling
about in a sweaty trucker’s stool in terms of animals I care about and wouldn’t
mind a tiny bit if they died painfully in the gut of the Sarlacc. BUT it is
like the knowingly-shite theme tune of an Italian Bond rip-off and it gave a
lot of completely ineffectual people the feeling they’d actually achieved some
massive victory over bigotry which they totally hadn’t so I guess this goes in
the win column.

#9 Common Linnets
– Calm After the Storm

Hey, it was the other Eurovision song I kinda liked, which
now I hear it in studio form is a bit too Every Breath You Take for my liking.
Not particularly interesting as Eurovision fare because it’s sincere enough you
kinda feel bad about insulting it, and a bit too good to be one of the comedy
entries. Put it in the win column again I guess.

#1 Rita Ora – I Will
Never Let You Down

I’ll be the fucking judge of that Rita, and no, you probably
won’t because my expectations of the chart are such that if I opened my
computer next Sunday night and a big sloppy shite rolled out of the screen over
my keys I’d probably give it at least three out of a possible ten. In its
defence this song is slightly less hateful because it has a beat, and presence
and soul because Rita, slight as she may be, is at least has a ghost of star
quality.

If you liked that Common Linnets, try Velvet
Underground-pretenders the Very Wicked, they’re from South Africa and they’re
cool as a breeze down Death Valley.

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